Made To Last Forever: A Family. A House. A Nation. The Facts
Fairbanks and Historical Facts that Built the Story
We recognize how important family is this time a year when we gather for Thanksgiving. This is a holiday the early Fairbanks observed not once a year, but many times when the local or Massachusetts Bay Colony (MBC) government of clergy felt God had shown them fortune by good crops and successes in other ways. They observed Thanksgiving by feasting together during a day of prayers of thanks and exaltation of God.
They had just as many days of humiliation. Days where local clergy and governing bodies or the MBC government declared a day of fasting and repentance because of woes that had befallen them such as epidemics, crop failures, and other hardships because they had displeased God.
Questions About the Made to Last Forever: …
Made to Last Forever: A Family. A House. A Nation. features Jonathan and Grace Fairbanks, all six of the Fairbanks children, Samuel Bullen, an indentured servant, Martha Pidge, an “adopted” child, and James Fales, an apprentice. All are actual people who lived in their roles based upon my research.
Made to Last Forever: A Family. A House. A Nation. already has 25 great reviews on Amazon in just over a month. It has 4.8 stars on Amazon, so people are reading and loving it.
I heard two comments that I wanted to clarify as I continue to blog about Made To Last Forever and the Fairbanks and Prescott families. Others may have the same questions.
One person commented that they couldn’t tell the facts from the fiction in the book. This is a biographical historical novel. It is strongly based on the facts, but it is not a historical book that contains citations and a bibliography. It would have become much too long and lost the quality of a story that many people appreciate. However, the above comment is a compliment to my writing. Be assured that nothing concrete happens in the book that isn’t a fact, i.e. Jonas never became a sailor, but he did work at ironsmith two years. The fiction takes you from fact to fact.
There is so much we cannot know about the Fairbanks in the 1600s because they left only a few letters or documents, ie: 1650 will of George Fairbanks, Jonathan’s half-brother in England and Richard Hartley, an English merchant’s, letter to Jonathan regarding their business arrangement in Dedham.
However, exploring the history that surrounds them gives us a glimpse of what their lives may have been like. The book presents the Fairbanks arriving in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1633. There is no documentation of the date or the ship on which the Jonathan Fairbanks family sailed. The Fairbanks family are first documented as settling in the newly founded Massachusetts Bay Colony as proprietors in Dedham, Massachusetts Bay Colony, one of the first two inland towns, on March 23, 1636/37 (DTR, Vol III, p. 28).
Jonathan Fairbanks was introduced for proprietorship by John Dwight. Dwight was in Watertown prior to Dedham but had no known association to Jonathan Fairbanks in England, so it is assumed that they met in Watertown.
Richard Fairbank’s familial relationship with the Jonathan Fairbanks family is not known. There is strong evidence in church records in Boston that Richard and his wife, Elizabeth, were in Boston by 1633. To tell a more complete story of early Massachusetts Bay Colony in the book, the Jonathan Fairbanks family arrives in the colony in 1633 and has a knowledge of and relationship with Richard and his wife. However, Jonathan and Grace could have arrived some time between 1633 and up to late 1636.
Another interested person asked why the other children, besides Jonas, were not written about extensively. All the children and the most important facts available about their lives between 1617 and 1668 have been identified, except the births of their children. The book ends with the death of Jonathan, their father, so any facts beyond that time are not included.
Unfortunately, only the father and sons are recognized in the Dedham Town Records Volume III and IV where many facts were verified. However, some facts about Mary and Susan’s husbands, Michael Metcalfe Jr. and Ralph Daye, were found and used to help develop the daughter’s characters in the book. For deeper research, I suggest these two sources (DTR, Vol III & Vol IV).
Saugus Ironworks, NPS
Jonas appears as a main character in this book to carry the theme of family relationships, especially father/son relationships. He had a more diverse life than the other children. That allowed the story to introduce more about Dedham’s early settlers and more Massachusetts Bay Colony history, like Saugus Ironworks, NPS. Yes, the author’s lineage is also through Jonas’s lineage.
The Original Fairbanks Family in MBC
St. John the Baptist Church, Halifax
Jonathan and Grace (Smith) Fairbanks were married on May 20th in 1617 in the St. John the Baptist Church in Halifax Parish of West Yorkshire, England. At that time Grace is documented as living in Warley. Jonathan’s residence was not indicated. That was customary if the male spouse was local. Many of the Fairbanks relatives lived in Sowerby across the river from Warley. It is believed that is where Jonathan Fairbanks lived at the time of their marriage. Much of the early Fairbanks history from England was taken from Ruth F. Joseph and James Swan Landberg’s work in England published in “Jonathan Fairbank of Dedham, Massachusetts and His Family in the West Riding of Yorkshire” in The New England Historical and Genealogical Register 166 (July 2012): 165-87.
Jonathan and Grace had six children from 1618 to about 1630. It appears by the spacing of their births, Grace didn’t lose any children in childbirth or infancy which was rare for the 1600s. Women usually had children approximately two years apart.
Font Cover at St. John the Baptist
The christening of the children shows us the location of the family while they were in England. John, the first son, was christened in the Halifax church, where Jonathan and Grace were marriage They lived in Warley at that time. George and Mary were christened in the Halifax church while the family was in Shelf, a town very near Warley or Sowerby. The family was back in Warley for the christening of Jonas.
This font cover would have been in place at the
time of the christening of the Fairbanks children.
Saint Mary The Virgin Church
Susan is believed to be christened in the St. Mary The Virgin Church in Thornton-in-Craven about 40 miles northwest of Sowerby. It is possible the family lived near there because Jonathan’s father had lived there until he died in 1625 and his half-brothers, John and George, by the first marriage of his father, owned land there.
It is not clear where Jonathan Jr. was born. To my knowledge there are no christening records for him. However, Sowerby was the location from which the Fairbanks family left England. The family left England perhaps only 3-6 years after the birth of Jonathan Jr. who is nicknamed Junior in the book to distinguish him from his father.
Grace was 33 to 36 when the family came to New England. She could have had several more children after immigrating to the New World, but there are no records of births here. Why she had no more children remains a mystery.
In the next blogs, I will tell the facts about the children of Jonathan and Grace Fairbanks as we know them. This blog became ten pages long when I tried to include all of them. You see, there is much more information written about all of the children in the book.
Some other characters that played important roles in the book are Samuel Bullen, an indentured servant, Martha Pidge an “adopted” daughter, and James Fales, an apprentice to George Fairbanks. They will also be discussed in future blogs. It appears the Fairbanks took these individuals into their family homes. The men became proprietors at the same time as the Fairbanks sons. Martha lived next door to George, the second son, and his family when she married Benjamin Bullard.
Each family member including those taken into their home is important in the Fairbanks heritage. All family lines are represented at the yearly National Fairbanks Reunions at the Fairbanks House in Dedham. That speaks to the importance and dedication of each line of the family to maintain the family’s history and heritage.
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More Facts to Come.
